


Like an Old Jacket

by Mireille



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-07-15
Updated: 2005-07-15
Packaged: 2018-08-18 19:23:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8173045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: A post-"Parting of the Ways" ficlet, 'cause everybody's got one.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For the [2005 Free Verse Challenge](http://www.livejournal.com/community/freeversefic/907.html). My snippet was: _There's a piece  
>  of you hanging / like an old jacket / on an old nail / beside a job / I never finished,_ and this is what my brain did.

Jack remembered dying. 

He wasn't sure why he would have remembered it, since he pretty obviously wasn't dead; he wasn't even injured. But he remembered the Dalek's staccato battle cry, and he remembered agony, and he remembered falling into blackness. 

And then he remembered waking up, chest heaving and heart pounding with terror, so none of it could have happened. If a Dalek had shot him, especially at that range, he'd be dead. He didn't know what had happened, or why it seemed the Daleks had disintegrated into the piles of dust he'd found, but what he remembered was obviously wrong. 

He'd shrugged it off, more or less. There were two years' worth of his life that he couldn't remember, and remembering one thing that couldn't possibly have happened seemed just as plausible. The recollected pain was already fading, so that now he only remembered that it had hurt, and didn't wake up sweating and shaking and feeling it all over again. Not that he'd ever felt it the first time, because here he was, and he wasn't dead. 

He wasn't sure how long it had been since the Doctor and Rose had gone. The day/night cycle on the station didn't seem to be consistent; the Daleks had probably blasted part of the timing circuitry. He'd tried to make a mark on the wall each time he slept, like a prisoner in one of the adventure programs he'd been hooked on as a kid, a hundred and ninety-odd thousand years ago, but he didn't think he slept all that consistently, either. He'd given up. Even if he ever was rescued, did he really want to remember exactly how long it was since he'd heard the TARDIS dematerializing without him? 

These days, however many days that had been, that was what he remembered when he woke up: being left behind. At first he'd told himself they'd be back, that it was an emergency dematerialization, that the Doctor (and Rose--who deserved to be so much more than an afterthought, but he thought she'd understand how everything, everyone, else faded into the background a bit around the Doctor) would never just abandon him. 

Then days had slipped into weeks, and then time had become meaningless again, and he'd stopped telling himself anything except that he didn't want them to come back for him. He'd been better off before he met them. He'd had those two missing years, but he'd been trying to fill the gaps in, and he'd have done it eventually. Not only that, but there'd been no need for him to play the hero. Daleks were fairytales, and Jack Harkness was a conman out only for a quick credit, and Time Lords had never existed. He could have gone on forever like that, and he'd have been happy enough.

He'd thought that he'd travel with them for a while, at least until he could get his hands on another ship, and then go back to his old life without any difficulty at all. He hadn't realized it would change him, that no matter how millions of parsecs and thousands of years away the TARDIS was right now, it would still feel as though that was where he was meant to be--as though part of him still was.

It was the part of him that was still stuck here that he needed to worry about, though. He was trying to cobble together the communications console; maybe someone on Earth would hear him and come to get him. Was there anyone left on Earth, he wondered, or had the Daleks wiped them all out? He'd find out soon enough. 

There would be people, and there'd be booze, and there'd be food that hadn't been processed to last indefinitely in storage. Clean clothes, a shower.... Jack concentrated on all the luxuries that would be available once he was planet-side. Even if things were falling apart at the seams down on Earth, he could probably charm his way into that much, at least. 

It would be a better life there than here. Here there was... scavenging from the dead. He'd disposed of the bodies in the first few days, reluctantly stripping them of anything he thought he might need--clothing that would fit him, battery packs for various electronic devices, mild painkillers, assorted keys from the station personnel, a hip flask one tech had been carrying (that had been drained the first "night")--before dragging them all into an airlock leading to a shuttle bay unused since the development of the transmat beam. He couldn't bring himself to space them--didn't want to look out a window and see them floating past--but at least in the airlock, they'd bother no one. 

Even now, though, he was a scavenger. The food supplies had been for employees and for the residents of the Big Brother games; the power, the oxygen, the _gravity_ were for people Jack had seen slaughtered. People he should have died with. People he _remembered_ dying with. 

He didn't let himself wish he really had died along with them. That wasn't the Jack Harkness way. He wasn't the self-sacrificing type, no matter what he'd been doing lately. That was all the Doctor's influence; he had a way of making you want to be a better person. Or maybe that was just Jack he had that effect on--him and Rose, and maybe it was just the people who fell in love with him who felt that way? 

Not that Jack was that naïve. He knew better. Knew you didn't fall for a centuries-old alien who'd seen his whole race destroyed. It was a recipe for getting hurt. 

For getting abandoned on a space station full of corpses, because for some reason, you weren't worth saving, when everyone else was. 

All the same, Jack decided that he was better off staying where he was. He blamed inertia, and didn't let himself hope that this way, the Doctor would be able to find him.


End file.
